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Jessica Chastain attends the New york premiere of 'Crimson Peak' on October 14. (Photo by Grant Lamos IV/Getty Images)

Jessica Chastain has been one of our most interesting and engaging would-be new stars. As such, it is news when she snags a new leading role, especially in an industry where leading roles/starring vehicles for women are rare enough to almost qualify as news. Said new project is an Edward Zwick-produced film entitled Woman Walks Ahead, which concerns a 19th-century woman who helped Sioux chieftain Sitting Bull fight to keep his land from the American government. It’s seemingly a Native American historical tale told from the point-of-view of a white ally.

It is an example of the proverbial Sophie’s Choice of modern Hollywood when it comes to attempts at diversity. On one hand, I am happy that Chastain has a new starring vehicle to call her own and doesn’t have to play the supporting wife or token love interest in a male-centric tale. On the other hand, something like (on paper, anyway) Woman Walks Ahead doesn’t necessarily sound like the kind of project we should be cheering. We shouldn't have to choose gender parity over racial diversity any more than we should champion racial diversity at the expense of gender parity.

Julie Delpy took some heat a couple weeks back when she exclaimed that (paraphrasing) white women have it worse than black men in terms of being able to speak out sans reprisal. Regardless of the scientific accuracy of said statement, it highlights a certain offshoot of the current diversity conversation. It pits the various disadvantaged groups against each other while the system continues unabated. We all know women get screwed in Hollywood in terms of opportunities afforded them compared to their male co-workers. Yes, women of color (not just black, of course) have noticeably fewer opportunities than white women, who in turn have fewer opportunities than white men.

But the general picture is that meaty supporting roles and leading roles are sparse enough for all women that it’s noteworthy when even a big Hollywood star like Anne Hathaway is able to produce two major upcoming vehicles (The Shower and Colossal) for herself. And the racial/ethnic issue is so grotesque that it counts as a triumph when Benjamin Bratt ended up voicing a Hispanic supervillain in Despicable Me 2 only after Al Pacino dropped out.

If it sounds like I’m teetering on the edge of a morally duplicitous #AllLivesMatter statement, well, that’s the conundrum, even for an outsider looking in who merely sees a systemic inequity and wishes it were not so. The obscene gender divide in Hollywood leads me, as a film critic/pundit who desperately wants to see more gender parity in mainstream cinema to consider holding my nose for something that otherwise might earn our universal ire.

So now it almost counts as a would-be triumph when Scarlett Johansson, multi-millionaire movie star, snags an outright franchise-friendly leading role in a big-budget sci-fi action-er. Never-mind that said project is DreamWorks SKG's Ghost in the Shell; an adaptation of a famously Japanese graphic novel/animated movie from nearly 30 years ago (now being distributed by Paramount/Viacom Inc.). I cheer when Kathryn Bigelow, five years after Zero Dark Thirty, snags a new directorial project even though it seems like a story (set during the a five-day racially-charged riot that took place in Detroit in the summer of 1967) that perhaps should be told by an African-American filmmaker.

And for a moment, I nodded in approval at the idea of Jessica Chastain getting a new starring vehicle, one directed by a woman no-less (Susanna White), irrelevant of what that starring vehicle represented. We can debate to what extent these projects are “problematic,” but I know full well that I would be less defensive of them, especially those first two, if they were (for example) starring Josh Brolin or directed by Ben Affleck. That’s the relative tragedy, one very small tragedy among many, of Hollywood’s systemic epidemic of gender disparity. We sometimes are put in a position of defending the indefensible (or at least somewhat dubious) because it represents a rising tide for one disenfranchised class at the potential expense of another.

So I applaud the notion of Elizabeth Banks snagging the kind of high-profile/scenery-chewing super villain role that male actors can take for granted even as I know in the back of my head that maybe Rita Repulsa in Lions Gate Entertainment's new Power Rangers movie should be played by a Japanese actress (which to be fair, may be a trade-off for the relative diversity of the five main heroes). I applaud the (white) feminist triumphs of Universal/Comcast Corp.'s Pitch Perfect 2 and Sisters even as I know full well I should be making note of some of the more stereotyped minority characters. Yet conversely I applaud the artistic and commercial triumph of Straight Outta Compton (also Universal... hmm) even as I know full-well that the female characters are delegitimized or left out of the story almost every step of the way.

That’s the end result of an industry that so prioritizes the white male’s narrative above all else. So pervasive and oppressive is the industry’s problem as a whole that we are inclined to celebrate anything resembling a singular triumph even a given triumph for one group results in a glorified smack in the face towards another. Obviously I am in no position to argue to what extent there should be a trade off for gender diversity over racial diversity, or vice-versa, only that there shouldn't really be a trade-off at all.